No, this is not a story set in New York City. It’s in D.C. Yes, I too feel sort of distressed about this fact.
If you love acting, why don’t you move to New York City?
I mean, I don’t even get callbacks here. So what do you want me to do? Also, my rent here is $1,340 per month. But I have a washer and dryer. And a loving girlfriend who knows how to operate them. She points these benefits out to me often.
Recently, I had my first audition. It feels cool to be a contemporary millennial in an East Coast city—even if it’s not New York—who can respond at brunch like, “Oh, just an audition,” when asked what I am gonna do with the rest of the day. It makes me feel like a character we’re rooting for on a TV show: relatable flaws, honest about the industry and its narcissism, struggling … but … his or her journey teaches us a lesson, like, “Strive, but appreciate the simple things.”
It also makes me feel important, like MY DAY has AUDITIONS in it. Though I do respect some of the other answers at that brunch. “Getting high and playing Mario Party.” The truth is, if this were a TV show, the Mario Party scene would likely be more compelling than my audition.
This audition is for “Monologue Madness,” a March Madness-style tournament of monologues. Over 100 people audition, 32 get in. When I explained this at brunch, a gay man who hates sports said, “Oh, even more popular than the real thing.” It was funny because that’s not true. But I was never good at basketball. Also, acting.
By the way, this is my first real audition. I’ve had other auditions—for improv teams, for community theater. Improv auditions feel like a steering committee analyzing a group of toddlers who, after just having met for the first time, are asked to build a complicated structure out of Legos together. If you suck at Legos, you’re fucked. If you’re great at Legos but suck at teamwork, you’re fucked. If you’re average at both, you better hope that steering committee—which rotates every audition—likes your style, sees something special, or is, like, your boyfriend or whatever.
Community theater auditions feel like a volunteer retreat. Everybody is so kind and so old. You leave yearning for something more—a craft, a higher knowledge, some resumed expertise—but that is quickly replaced by an appreciation for their earnestness. Until they email and tell you somebody volunteered better than you.
Brunch ended at 2pm. The audition was at 4:30pm, so I might as well walk down to the National Gallery of Art and spend some time there. Would this story be better if I visited The Whitney? I don’t know. It would be more expensive. Say what you will about the Federal Government, but all the Smithsonian museums are free (even if they do close during a shutdown).
If I could change one thing about my experience at the museum, I would have taken a shit there. The museum was peaceful—I.M. Pei’s winding towers on the East End hold many secrets whispered by Rothko, Picasso, and Magritte. Something about a smooth and elegant frame makes me feel more mature. Closer to art, prime for an audition. However, I.M. Pei’s beautiful building is more of a poem than a map. I couldn’t find a bathroom and got anxious and left. On my walk to the theater, the sky opened and started to hail. My butt wanted to follow this example..
Standing in the “stage door entrance” (oh la la la), deuce popping out of my butt like a Peeping Tom retreating behind a pillar, I realized I forgot headshots. Not that I had real ones. But I had nothing for today.
Equal parts charming and foolish, I ask the cute woman behind the desk if she can help me by printing my resume/headshot, which is a Word doc of classes and stupid improv names like “Comet Sauce,” accompanied by a (fucking) screenshot of me in a heavily patterned shirt from an improv website. As the cute woman gets up from her desk to go the printer, she dances, dreads flowing in the air a bit, “cheating out” to face me and smile. Definitely an actor herself. If I were 22, I might have asked her to get drinks. We may have met up once or twice before I chose binge drinking over intimacy. She smiled and handed me the papers.
Black and white (printer was out of color ink—damn the arts). Holding my “headshots,” the most tangible representation of mediocrity I’ve seen to date, I thought, “What the fuck am I doing?” I turned four of these pieces of printer paper in to an attendant and walked up four flights of stairs to the waiting area.
Finally, time to shit.
The toilet was clogged.
I walked back down to the attendant and the cute girl behind the desk.
“Can we help you again?”
I told them everything.
Hands raised, not wanting anymore details: “No worries … do your thang.”
After the most meditative shit possible, I walked past her again. “Kill it,” she said.
I don’t know if she meant the audition, the toilet, or myself.
This would have been a good part for the TV show, if we weren’t given access to the gay men playing Mario Party:
A bunch of random people standing around in a weird place, all doing their own eccentric gyrations. Looking equal parts aspirational and dumb. The other actors there were older than I am.
Oh, not him. He’s a bartender and he’s hot.
I meditated, went over the monologue in my head, whisper-rapped Andre 3000’s verse from “Rosa Parks.” That’s my tradition (because I strive to have the most performative warm-up).
Right on schedule—which, here, means thirty minutes late—I am called into The Room.
It is a bare room, huge and empty. The kind and stylish millennial who ran the audition room said he would raise his hand at one minute and fifty seconds and call the whole thing at two minutes. He gave somebody else a hug earlier, so I already felt excluded.
The two judges looked tired and elegant. Their smiles were genuine. They were older, put-together women, like the nicest people at a country club.
I am doing a monologue as Jackie from Stephen Agley Guirgis’ Motherfucker with the Hat. The playwright’s name was hard to pronounce, but she responded, “Great piece.”
Okay.
I started, I hit all the right rhythms:
“This guy, the boss n shit, he talked to me like one human being to anothuh, he said
(in a new, more gravely New York Accent), ‘We only got two rules here: be polite to the tenants, and be polite to each othuh.’ (quick pause)
And I was like, (the voice now has a comic tinge) ‘Those are good rules sir,’
(nice pause, kind of confused, recalling past dialogue is no walk in the park for my character) And then HE was like, (gravely again) ‘Good enough, start Monday.’”
They laughed.
But I did the whole monologue facing upstage, like I did in class when I had a scene partner. They didn’t like that, asked me to do it facing over their shoulders, which made sense immediately, and I felt dumb I didn’t do that originally.
I knew they asked for adjustments but have never done that before. I took a deep breathe, took my time, and ran it again. While I was faced over their shoulders, I felt them watching me. And I lost my concentration and froze. Not one of those “OH FUCK” freezes, where the whole audience looks down in shared agony. It was just a second.
But they knew it.
I knew it.
The pauses in that dialogue are off, no laughs this time.
I regain my shit and finish. They thanked me, and I left the room faster than my feelings did.
I walked in the freezing rain to a nearby dive bar, deserted on this disgusting Sunday, ostensibly to write this essay or whatever, really to numb myself with strong beers. There, my feelings caught up.
Because of that moment of hesitation, that flub, that mistake, my body wants to feel shame. It wants to punish me. But, even if I get this, I can’t do it. My girlfriend and I will be going to Thailand when the tournament starts.
The masochistic nature of art makes me feel like I should skip the trip. Like I should stay home and dedicate every moment of my life to the craft. Wait by the cell phone on the shitty end of a selfish relationship.
But, also, I’ve never been to Thailand. And my girlfriend calls me “Sweet Pea.” We’ll probably meet cool people on the trip, from all over the world, who can expand our horizons and teach us interesting things.
Oh, you’re from D.C. What do you do for work?
Well, I work in communications, but I want to be an actor.
An actor?
(They’ll pause, craft a revolutionary idea, and then say it):
Why don’t you move to New York?
Fuuuuuuuuuuucccccccccccckkkkkkkk.
